UC Irvine

“The General and Her Soldiers: How Phyllis Schlafly and Eagle Forum Mobilized the Conservative Movement” argues that beginning in the 1960s, Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum organized a political network to erect new institutions in order to promote a conservative takeover of the Republican Party. While Schlafly and Eagle Forum are widely known for their conservative anti-feminist mobilization to block the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Eagles were experienced activists working to consolidate conservative political power, before and after the Amendment’s defeat. By participating in movement efforts to build a powerful alternative news media, and designing activist strategy trainings, Schlafly and Eagle Forum forged alliances between grassroots activists, business leaders, and politicians. In the end, their efforts exerted a profound influence on Republican Party politics and policy in the United States. Through archival and ethnographic research, I demonstrate that Schlafly created a distinct model of conservative women’s activism that I call weaponized housewifery. This style of activism was based in the racialized logics of white womanhood and allowed Eagle Forum to function as professionally trained political activists. Schlafly and her Eagles utilized the image of the housewife as a uniform, and as a tactical weapon to deploy on the media, state legislatures, and Congress. Weaponized housewifery combined surveillance, coercion, and gendered performativity to shape politics on interpersonal, national, and international scales. Schlafly and her Eagles applied this activism style broadly within the conservative movement before, during, and after their anti-feminist bid to block the Equal Rights Amendment. Schlafly occupied a liminal space within the movement. She was neither a member of the grassroots or the movement elite, but she inhabited both spaces simultaneously. Eagle Forum functioned in the same way. Together, Schlafly and Eagle Forum created frameworks of institutional support that continue to shape the conservative movement.